Tech bros, incels, dating apps: is this the literary equivalent of doomscrolling?

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SHORT STORIES
Rejection
Tony Tulathimutte
Fourth Estate, $36.99

At some point during her reclusive life, Emily Dickinson began a poem on a scrap of notepaper: “I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?”

The poet herself would remain a literary nobody until years after her death. Perhaps now, as the internet teems with anonymous accounts and inconsequential text, her words will be recognised for what they are: the credo of our over-engaged and under-loved age, the inner song of YouTube comments and unopened Snapchats.

Otherwise, if the world still isn’t ready, the American writer Tony Tulathimutte is here to take on that mantel on behalf of all the lonely souls online. His new book, Rejection, is set mostly on the internet – on message boards, dating apps, timelines, where the author realises his characters with such artful and painful exactness that his reader will want to trade their iPhone for a Nokia brick.

The first story, The Feminist, which went viral when it was published in literary magazine n+1 in 2019, chronicles the decline and fall of a man who imbibes all the tenets of 2010s online progressivism, only to find that, while he has done “the intellectual labor to empathise with the broadest spectrum of female perspectives”, he is still left “[d]ragging his virginity like a body bag into his mid-twenties”.

With a cool irony, Tulathimutte shows a man’s mind shift from gender positivity and resentment of the patriarchy to the warped victimisation of men’s rights accounts and incel forums, like a miniature dramatisation of the transformation of Twitter into X.

Author Tony Tulathimutte.Credit: Clayton Cubitt

Other scenarios in the collection revolve around similar young men whose lives do not extend far from their screens. Our Dope Future is narrated by a tech bro whose startups include a “sexual consent on the blockchain” app and a “meal-replacement shake called Döpesauce”. The story takes the form of an extended blog post written by this Elon Musk-ite, in which he describes wooing a woman with his “algorizzim” and subsequently imprisoning and surveilling her to help her achieve her “life goals”.

In another story, a man comes out as gay but is unable to reconcile the openness and liberality of contemporary society – including queer and kink-friendly dating apps – with his own sadistic fetishes. Another is simply a series of metaphors for the humiliating state of being a rejected man: “Passing your neighbor’s house, you catch a glimpse of someone through his living room window, lit up by the television he’s watching alone in the dark, and think, What a loser ... on your way home to do the exact same thing.”

Among the most substantial and distinctive stories is Pics, which follows the life of an increasingly alienated woman following a hookup with a friend. While the narrative apparently begins as a didactic tale of sexting and erotic possession, it leads somewhere both less expected and more familiar: her life becomes dominated by this tryst in a way that is aided and abetted by the technology around her.

She pores over saved chats and her photo library’s “Memories”, she “knows the algorithm will show [her friend] anything she posts”, she becomes only slightly more miserable than a standard person logging eight hours a day of Screen Time.

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As a collection, Rejection makes some attempt to tie these disparate stories together, with the same social media accounts and forums popping up across different lives and timelines. The more convincing through line is the ubiquitous undercurrent of loneliness and discontent that these characters share because they have all been wired by the same algorithms – algorithms that equally dictate the life of a Thai-American woman in Massachussetts, a white man in New York, and a teenager on TikTok in Sydney.

It comes as a relief, then, that Tulathimutte shows so much glee and skill in writing exactly how dismal online life is. A photo of an ex-boyfriend shows a man “appallingly buff, with a Thanos jawline, an immaculate Caesar cut”. A despairing woman is “clutching her head like Psyduck”. Someone alone in their apartment muses that “[p]odcast subscriptions are a numerical measure of loneliness”. Someone else enjoys “the consolement of his consoles, and the contentment of content”.

Even when the characters’ lives become excruciatingly sad or overwhelmingly explicit – and they very often achieve both – Rejection features some of the most obscene and bleak writing this side of mainstream publishing – Tulathimutte provides such acute observation of the world, and maintains such brio in depicting it, that he provides implicit reassurance to the reader: they’re not engaged in the literary equivalent of doomscrolling.

In a world of bright screens and unregulated dopamine, it’s more than a little comfort.

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